How big are the Banda Islands?
In the last post I said that the Banda Islands — the only places in the world that produced nutmeg and mace before the nineteenth century — are extremely small, smaller even than many towns elsewhere in the world.
To show you just how small these islands are, and how remarkable it is that they were known by name in medieval Venice and Beijing, let’s progressively zoom out from this map of Banda on Google Maps. Here are the islands when zoomed right in (Figure 1):
Now here’s Banda next to Seram and Ambon, larger islands to the north that supplied Banda with sago and other edible staples (Banda is in the green circle, barely visible — Figure 2):
Here Banda has completely disappeared from view (Figure 3). To the west you can see Sulawesi; to the east, New Guinea; and to the south, Timor. It’s easy to see that the Banda Islands are even smaller than some of the tinier and less well-known Indonesian islands.
Now look at this map of the Earth with Banda at the centre and try to remember where it is in relation to everything else. These islands supplied all the nutmeg in the medieval world, from Hungary and Crimea to Delhi and Japan and Zanzibar. Consider how far away the islands are even from China — how much closer they are to Australia and even Palau and Guam — and how big and varied the medieval world really must have been (Figure 4):
Nutmeg found its way into Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Chinese encyclopedias and Cuman glossaries. In the Middle Ages it was used as a food and medicine throughout Afro-Eurasia. And it all came from these extremely tiny islands.
I have a Ko-Fi account, in case you’re interested in showing your appreciation for this and other Medium stories: https://ko-fi.com/P5P6HTBI
